The June 29th edition of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer led with, “Time Warner, Inc. was put on this earth not to produce Game of Thrones but to punctuate the cycles of investment enthusiasm.” Grant’s reminds the forgetful that a few bubbles ago Time Warner and AOL merged and that “announcement in 2000 rang down the curtain on the dot-com era.”

The best budget rule in the United States is Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights. Known as TABOR, this provision in the state’s constitution says revenues can’t grow faster than population plus inflation. Any revenue greater than that amount must be returned to taxpayers.

Earlier this year, Starbucks corporation settled a lawsuit with Simon Property Group of the closure of many of Starbucks’s Teavana stores.

There is almost complete unanimity among economists that the most important role of the central bank is to attain price level stability. It is held that price stability promotes economic growth and people’s well-being by increasing the efficiency of the market mechanism. According to the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York William J. McDonough,

Recently I attended a wake in Rego Park, Queens, a county which is unfortunately a part of New York City. It was the end of a wonderful kosher deli that was beloved by Jew and non-Jew alike: Ben’s Best.

In 2006, Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez declared:

There is a market that can be reactivated through barter and not through currency. Let us break that curse [of capitalism].

During Mises University this week, we will be sharing short interviews with some of this year’s students.

Felicia Cowley is a first time Mises Research Fellow and a PhD candidate at George Mason University. She received her bachelors degree in economics at Troy University, where her professors included Mises Institute Associated Scholars G.P. Manish and Malavika Nair. 

In a recent post I explained that China’s manipulations of its own currency hurt only herself and not her trading partners and, therefore, retaliatory tariffs were not warranted and would be self-defeating anyway. China harms herself by causing her own money supply to expand, which destroys capital through malinvestment and causes prices to rise domestically. Retaliatory tariffs cause American goods to rise in price, resulting in a recession and generally lower standard of living. Few economists claim otherwise.